Trying it out

Trying out the blog in preparation for the Open Learn conference.

Ideas for later trials

The open content system is potentially of use to eveyone. However as Maurice Sloman said in a recent seminar it is hard to design only for emergent use, he would rather try to meet the needs of some user group, and then let other uses emerge. This means we should  pick some targets we expect to be included and set out to study them. Candidates include:

• Transistion from school to university

• Remote communities – the commonwealth of learning has sugested the virtual university of the small states of the commonwealth

• Enthusiast communities – e.g. Birdwatchers, sports fans, health, etc.

• Retired people

• Education drop outs

• Partner universities eg in Brazil

There are many more.

Trials

We are starting to plan the trial set for OpenLearn. I am very keen to set up two early trials. One would be be as initial technology trial with some friendly users very probably from aross the university. They would be able to understand the role for the system and step it through but stop short of a real test. The second trial though would take a potential uer group through a scenario. This use of trials worked well  on the MOBIlearn mobile learning project and should take place as soon as we can, in practice that will be September.